


Into the Unknown

by The_Violet_Howler



Series: Kingdom Hearts and the Heroine's Journey [5]
Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Analysis, Essays, Gen, Heroine's Journey, Meta, Nonfiction, Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:15:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25049023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Violet_Howler/pseuds/The_Violet_Howler
Summary: An analysis of how the ubiquitousness of the Hero’s Journey and the metanarrative of the Heroine’s Journey influence fan perception of Kingdom Hearts II.
Series: Kingdom Hearts and the Heroine's Journey [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1765777
Kudos: 22





	Into the Unknown

**Author's Note:**

> In the original post I had a gif of Elsa singing the last line of "Into the Unknown", but I can't figure out how to put gifs/videos on AO3, so I swapped it out for the thumbnail from the PATD lyric video of the song on YouTube when reposting it here.
> 
>  **Edit 7/4/2020:** I went back and forth on what to focus on for a while as I was writing this piece, and I was really focused on meeting my self-imposed Friday posting deadline. By the time I finished writing it was 11:50pm on Thursday night and I had a 9 hour shift at work starting the next morning, so I didn't really do as much editing before positing as I did with the previous essays. One of my mutuals talked to me about how my word choice in some paragraphs wasn't as neutral as I've been trying to have my essays be, so I went back and made some adjustments.

A common viewpoint I tend to see from some corners of the Kingdom Hearts fanbase is that Kingdom Hearts II - particularly the Final Mix version - is the best game in the series. While the side of the fanbase that isn’t really active in fandom spaces is primarily focused on gameplay, even on tumblr and other fan community spaces I’ve seen some people express that the series started going downhill in the games that came out after KH2. Although I disagree with the sentiment, it makes sense why some fans hold that view. 

Without knowledge of future games, the ending of Kingdom Hearts II might appear on the surface to be the conclusion of the story. The first game, Chain of Memories, and KH2 form a seemingly complete story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Sora finds his friends like he set out to do in the first game and they go home with the promise of further adventures serving as their happily ever after. The central plot appears to have been wrapped up, leaving a blank slate for new stories. 

If this were a traditional Hero’s Journey, the end of Kingdom Hearts II would correspond to the Boon of Success or “Ultimate Boon[1]”, the stage at which the protagonist receives their reward and accomplishes the goal of their quest. When a story sets up an identifiable plot structure and follows through, it produces a sense of satisfaction and catharsis in the audience, whether they know the words to label that structure or not. The appearance of Sora accomplishing the goal of his quest aligns with how audiences expected the story to end, so they feel that satisfaction and catharsis because their gut told them this is what’s supposed to happen.

When people cannot see an established framework in a story, or if it deviates from the one it appears to be following, it gives audiences a visceral sense of wrongness. This is part of why audiences reacted so negatively to the final season of Voltron: Legendary Defender and the third movie of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, for example. While not everyone had the vocabulary to articulate it, both series aligned with the framework of the Heroine’s Journey in their previous installments. But in their final season and movie, respectively, the final steps of that template were almost entirely absent - only visible in one case as echoes at best [2]. 

While 358/2 Days on its own fit neatly between Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts II without radically challenging the audience's perception of the series thus far, Birth by Sleep completely flipped people’s understanding of Sora’s journey. With the plotlines being set up by coded and Dream Drop Distance, Kingdom Hearts II didn’t work as the “Boon of Success” in a Hero’s Journey anymore. His return home at the end of that game was now a momentary reprieve instead of a happily ever after. 

So with each new “side” game building up to the final confrontation with Master Xehanort, fans began to emphasize Kingdom Hearts III’s status as a finale. While Tetsuya Nomura asserted that the series would continue past the end of the Dark Seeker Saga, many fans went into Kingdom Hearts III with the expectation that every loose end would be tied up, every mystery solved and every question answered. I suspect these fans believed that since Kingdom Hearts II was not the cathartic conclusion they initially believed it to be, then the series’ true “Boon of Success” _had_ to be Kingdom Hearts III. After all, the Hero’s Journey is generally broken up into three acts, perfect for a trilogy of “main” games. 

And yet Kingdom Hearts III _also_ failed to deliver on that sense of satisfaction. Xehanort has been defeated, but there are still mysteries to be solved and new threats on the horizon. The trios from Days and BBS have been saved, but now it’s Sora himself who’s trapped in a seemingly hopeless situation. Instead of following a predictable story pattern to its logical conclusion, the series has once again denied them that sense of satisfaction and is heading, like the song says, 

If you aren’t aware of the Heroine's Journey, then it probably _would_ look as if the development team is making everything up as they go with no clear endgame. The thing that I find interesting is that fans coming to this conclusion may not have happened entirely by accident. 

Maureen Murdock specifically developed her template as a critique of what she considered the major flaws of Campbell’s framework. To that end, stories that follow her outline mimic the external sequence of events from a Hero’s Journey up until toward the second half of Act II at the latest. Other Heroine’s Journey templates do this as well, although the ones I know of are not as blatant about the mimicry as Murdock’s. 

In going to the endpoint of a Hero’s Journey and then moving past it, the Heroine’s Journey primes its audience to mirror the journey of its protagonist. You follow the traditional route that you’ve been conditioned to expect from repeated exposure, but once you reach the goal you find yourself feeling unsatisfied and struggling to figure out why following the patterns you know isn’t working. The fact that the formula the series follows is not as well known as the one people assumed it was following is the icing on the cake. 

The Heroine’s Journey challenges the preconceptions and biases of the audience by its very nature, so it makes perfect sense why some fans would see Kingdom Hearts II as a high point for the franchise. It appears to conform to popular interpretations of what formula the story is following, while every game since has been challenging that perspective in different ways. The lore got more complicated. The backstories of certain characters turn out to be different than what we assumed. Information we received in the early games turned out to be incorrect. 

But most people don’t like having their opinions challenged. Not just in fandom spaces but in general. So when a story that previously supported their opinions turns around and starts challenging them, they are more likely to hold on to the part of the story that aligns with their interpretation of it. To yearn for the time when the narrative was simpler. I’ve been seeing this phenomenon in the Voltron fandom since 2018, where I saw some fans expressing the opinion that the show went downhill after Season 2 - also the end of Act I for that series - as the show’s third season resulted in an expansion of the story in a direction that was different than the one that they were expecting. 

Nevertheless, that’s the kind of story that Kingdom Hearts is telling. The series repeatedly challenges players to _think_ about what’s going on in the story instead of just accepting everything at face value. All while adhering to a narrative formula built on challenging societal biases and the status quo. While I think that fans would be less confused if the Heroine’s Journey was more widely known, the fact that much of this confusion parallels the framework’s core emotional journey is a fantastic bit of symmetry. Fortunately, we are finally entering the last act of the story. The series is fast approaching the phase of the Heroine’s Journey where everything is made clear - in which the point that this story is trying to make finally gets explained. 

**Author's Note:**

>  **Sources:**  
>  [1] Wikipedia - The Hero’s Journey  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey  
> [2] “The Heroine with a Thousand Faces;” June 13, 2019.  
> https://www.teampurplelion.com/heroine-with-a-thousand-faces/  
> 


End file.
